Note for the Virginia History online forum

Some members might possibly want to read my op-ed in today's Newport News 
Daily Press. The editors headlined it "Fort Monroe self-emancipators' 
courageous act changed the world." 
http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-nws-oped-corneliussen-0522-20130521,0,7676873.story 
(Please contact me off-list if you want to read the 630-word piece but can't 
get access: Corneliussen [[at]] Verizon.net)

The op-ed disputes the widespread but deficient--not to say racially 
obtuse--interpretation of the 1619-to-1861 Fort Monroe freedom story. That 
interpretation focuses not on enslaved Americans who acted, but on a white 
general who reacted. The op-ed proposes that national media attention is the 
only hope now--an admittedly very long-shot hope--for saving this national 
treasure's Chesapeake Bay sense of place. That's of course a long shot in 
large part because the National Trust for Historic Preservation--forced to 
pick its battles, and choosing to live down from its high-stature name in 
this matter--withholds affirmation that costly, counterproductive 
development on the Fort Monroe bayfront would cause harm like that 
imaginable from costly, counterproductive development on the hillside 
leading up to Thomas Jefferson's house. It's a very long shot, but still: 
reporters do pay attention to Virginia's 2013 elections, to Big Money in 
politics, to the Civil War sesquicentennial and to post-superstorm-Sandy 
coastal-overdevelopment folly. So although I'm not banking on it, such 
attention could conceivably still shame Virginia into reconsidering the 
once-in-a-century stewardship failure that the commonwealth is grimly 
cementing for the coming thousand years.

Thanks.

Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/
http://www.physicstoday.org/daily_edition/science_and_the_media
http://tjscience.org/

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